1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a thin-film magnetic head which performs a magnetic recording action by a perpendicular recording scheme, a method of manufacturing the same, a head gimbal assembly, and a hard disk drive.
2. Related Background Art
A hard disk drive has a large recording capacity and is used as the heart of a storage device. The hard disk drive records and reproduces data to/from a hard disk (recording medium) by a thin-film magnetic head.
The thin-film magnetic heads can roughly be classified according to their recording schemes into those of longitudinal magnetic recording type and those of perpendicular magnetic recording type. The longitudinal magnetic recording scheme records data in a longitudinal direction within a recording surface of a hard disk (recording medium), while the perpendicular magnetic recording scheme records data such that the direction of recording magnetization formed in the hard disk is made perpendicular to the recording surface. The thin-film magnetic heads of perpendicular magnetic recording type have been considered more promising than those of longitudinal magnetic recording type, since they can realize a much higher recording density than that in the longitudinal magnetic recording scheme, while their recorded hard disks are less susceptible to heat fluctuation.
Meanwhile, a conventional magnetic head of perpendicular magnetic recording type (perpendicular magnetic recording head which will also be referred to as “PMR” in the following) has a magnetic pole layer and a thin-film coil. The PMR has the structure of an electromagnet with the thin-film coil wound around the magnetic pole layer.
As the conventional PMR, PMRs each including a shield layer on a trailing side of a main magnetic pole layer are disclosed, for example, in JP 2007-272958 (referred to also as Patent Document 1), JP 2010-176732 (referred to also as Patent Document 2), JP 2010-157303 (referred to also as Patent Document 3), JP 2009-295262 (referred to also as Patent Document 4) and so on. A PMR 600 illustrated in FIG. 43 is one example of such PMRs.
The PMR 600 has a main magnetic pole layer 601 through which a recording magnetic field along the direction perpendicular to the recording medium passes, a thin-film coil 602 wound around the main magnetic pole layer 601, a recording gap layer 603, and a shield layer 604 opposite to the main magnetic pole layer 601 with the recording gap layer 603 intervening therebetween.